The Water of Umibōzu (pre-alpha state)

Our initial thoughts on the concept were that, due to it being based on a Japanese myth, playing should feel like an experience and like a journey. We want to keep the spiritual and mysterious (not everything is known) nature of the concept and build our game around that. What art style would suit the above best? It became clear pretty early that a more stylistic approach rather than a realistic one fits our concept best. Too detailed art draws away the focus and the attention – the game is not supposed to be realistic. The water is not supposed to be super realistic. Playing Umibōzu should feel like imagining the myth. In the end, we decided to approach this theme by giving the game a really unique art style. It should feel that the game is being played on Japanese paper with flowing ink action as in game components, supporting the setting in an Asian culture on the one hand and also indicating some mythical and spiritual elements on the other hand.

Style guide reference : Ink on paper and paper texture

The water in Umibōzu hereby plays a really important role, since it is the core background component and accompanies the player throughout the entire game. Ideally, the Water should still feel liquid while also having a paper vibe to it. Another point that was taken into consideration while creating the water is that it has to look good from every direction, since the player can freely move around the map. The orignal concept document does not mention the design of the water at all, giving our group some more creative freedom. The water in Umibōzu is made by creating a custom shader and applying it to a material in the Unity engine. The shader consists of a main texture that resembles paper and a noise texture as well as UV coordinates to make it look liquid. The textures were created using Adobe After Effects and Photoshop, the shader was done using the ShaderForge plug-in for Unity. Almost all attributes of the Water such as the color or the flow strength can be regulated through code or the Unity inspector, leaving the option open to implement different types of water behaviors in different stages of the game. I decided to go with a shader rather than a sprite animation since it is easier to iterate through different new ideas and in my opinion, it is more dynamic and lively. The material goes through adjustments and improvement several times in a scrum environment, which is only possible in that case because of it being a shader for a material.

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6 Kommentare zu „The Water of Umibōzu (pre-alpha state)“

Your article is well constructed and most importantly: concise. Easy to read, grammatically correct and allows the reader to get a clear understanding of what went through your mind when deciding upon how you want the game to actually look at his final state.

Nevertheless it would have been interesting to get at the beginning a quick explanation on what Omibozu actually is and why the folklore around it makes sense towards your design choice.

Also an image of your own work side to side with your style guide reference could have been a nice touch, because it is intriguing to see how you interpreted this „ink on paper“ technique even if it doesn’t necessarily worked out the way you expected.

Still it is a very good article, it clearly shows that you understood the MDA framework and how the chosen aesthetic/art style impact your game and helps to convey the desired feeling to the player.

Hey, interesting blog post. Me and my team are also creating Umibozo, and we also felt that it was important to keep the aesthetic presented in the original concept, but also give it our own twist. We were toying with the idea of making our game look like it was painted, like what you’ve decided to do, but we couldn’t figure out how to go about it. I am therefore very interested to see how your game turns out so that I can see how to accomplish this style in future. I would also have loved to see some game screen or art asset mockups done in this style to get better idea of how this would look inside the game.

Your choice of using a shader for the water is well argued and makes sense. It also makes me want to learn Unity better in order to get ideas on how to improve our game. This also makes me a bit sad that you didn’t go into much detail on the process. Showing a couple of screenshots of how the texture looked before being added in Unity and how you created the shader would have been very informative and would’ve given me a better understanding of the process.

In the end I think you’ve done a good job going through what you’ve done, but I would’ve liked to see more examples what you did in order to get a better picture of it. Keep up the good work!